ENTR ACTE Claudiakappenberg

An Interdisciplinary Reading of the Film Entr’acte Claudia Kappenberg Preamble This chapter draws on film history and theory, on philosophy and on discourses in screendance. Furthermore, it brings together a 1920s filmmaker, avant-garde artists, a film theorist from the 1940s, Belà Balàzs, a philosopher from the 1980s, Gilles Deleuze, as well as a few other figures. Why such disparate material, and why, especially, Deleuze? In an essay on movement and stillness from 2006, the author Yve Lomax points out that the birth of cinema happened exactly at the time when philosophy was trying to put movement into thought.1 Lomax refers to that fact that ideas, concepts, and thought itself were altered through a reconfiguration of the idea of movement in and around the 1900s, through the writing of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson formulated a fundamentally new concept of movement, space, and time, undertaking a perceptual shift whereby a notion of movement as a fundamental illusion, produced through the sequencing of temporal parts that are in themselves immobile, is replaced by a concept in which these constituent parts are themselves mobile and in constant motion, producing a duration which is equivalent to change over time. This shift and the recognition of the possibility of true change over time provoked a shift from a classic philosophy that believed in the eternal order of things, to a new, modern philosophy based on the idea of mobility, the new, and the singular. Henri Bergson’s new idea of motion coincided with the advent of film and became symptomatic of the wider twentieth century; it found an expression also in new architectural forms and urban planning, new modes of transport and nomadic lifestyles, fluid concepts of identity and gender, and so on. Whole categories aligned themselves with the idea of mobility, as if assembled on a large slippery slope. The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is Kappenberg 1 rooted in this shift and is concerned with thinking in terms of motion. As Lomax writes: “Deleuze never stops attempting to put motion into thought. How to keep thought moving? For Deleuze, this is the real question.”2 As a philosopher of movement, Deleuze therefore makes for a good companion in the exploration of the development of film as art and of Entr’acte, a cinematic avant-garde project of the early twentieth century. Entr’acte was an adventurous collaboration between artists from different disciplines, who came together to celebrate motion and all that which it entailed. Francis Picabia was anti-art and against reason; Renè Clair was disappointed with what film had produced until then. In Entr’acte, they attacked bourgeois conventions and their aesthetic traditions, and dismantled the conventional narratives associated with film. Deleuze’s theory of cinema is highly sympathetic to their endeavour and concerns itself exactly with the kind of shattered image world which the artists celebrated. Perhaps Deleuze’s philosophy also forms part of the legacy of that time; as the French writer and philosopher Catherine Clément notes concerning Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “Politics, ethnology, music, women’s work, all that ceases to exist: it’s philosophy. Or maybe not. It’s writing, and maybe thought.”3 Clément’s comment highlights the porosity and fluidity of Deleuze’s discourse and the uncertainty of its boundaries. She is not even certain if it still is philosophy. Similarly we cannot be sure if Entr’acte should be described as a film. Historical Context and Cultural Debates In the 1920s, avant-garde artists turned to film as a new medium even though it was not yet established as a medium for making art. As Gilles Deleuze points out in Cinema 1, the possibility of film to display actual movement did not correspond to the current remit of art, Kappenberg 2 “since art seemed to uphold the claims of a higher synthesis of movement, and to remain linked to the poses and forms that science had rejected.”4 Film, it seemed, was too realistic, too closely mirroring the flux of the everyday to be considered Art in the traditional sense. The early film clips by the Lumière brothers and the chase films by Mack Sennett were dismissed as amusement for the proletariat, akin to fairground rides and rollercoasters. Some visual artists, however, like Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, as well as filmmaker René Clair, saw the subversive potential that film could offer. A detailed examination of the making of Entr’acte will reveal their visions and explore the differences between Dadaist and Surrealist ambitions, in order to to pinpoint the exact “co-ordinates” of the film within the Parisian avant-gardes. Key to the project was Rolf de Maré, an important Parisian figure of the 1920s and the founder of the Ballets Suédois [Swedish Ballet], a famous hothouse for new avant-garde productions. In 1924, he invited Francis Picabia and the composer Eric Satie to make a full evening ballet, giving the artists a carte blanche to experiment and challenge what dance could be.5 Picabia and Satie agreed to invite the young filmmaker René Clair to direct a film for the interlude of the ballet, based on initial ideas by Picabia. Clair had only made one film by then, Paris qui dort (1923), and Entr’acte was a brilliant opportunity to make his second. The evening ballet was designed to enrage and challenge the bourgeois audiences of Paris. The story goes that Picabia titled the performance Relâche, meaning Theatre Closed or Performance Suspended, in order to avert potential censorship as both he and the Ballet Suédois were known for outrageous performances. In actual fact, the opening performance was cancelled, by coincidence, because of illness of the principal dancer, Jean Borlin. Audiences went home, enraged and delighted at the same time, believing they had been part of a DADA hoax. However the performance did eventually go ahead as planned on the following nights. Kappenberg 3 Picabia conceived Entr’acte as the cinematic parts of the ballet with a short prologue and a longer film for the intermission. The work breaks therefore with the convention of an interval in ballet performances which would normally allow the audiences to socialize and enjoy their own company. René Clair’s realisation of Picabia’s proposition is perhaps best described as a fast and confusing collage of images and scenes, devoid of narrative and intended to touch the audience by audio-visual means—that is, through a visceral composition of images and sounds which attack the senses of the audiences and give them an almost physical experience. Clair uses a series of Parisian locations such as rooftops, streets, a fairground, and the countryside, and plays mischievously with the spectator’s expectations as well as their moral codes. The first section functions as a curtain raiser and shows the slow-motion loading of a canon which fires straight into the auditorium. The second section is screened during the interval of the live performance and begins with a collage of up-side- down rooftops, intercut with images of dolls with rubber balloons as heads which inflate and deflate. This is followed by the infamous close-up from below of a dancer in a tutu who is later revealed to be a bearded man and which is intercut with street scenes and a boxing attack with white gloves, again directed at the audience; the music, composed by Satie, repeats in this moment the musical motif which first underscores the scene of the canon that is fired at the audience. The following film section is a collage of burning matches on a head, again intercut with the ballerina from below; this is followed by a chess board game on the rooftops which is layered with further street scenes and combined with a more lyrical sequence of the ballet dancer. Eventually everything is submerged in water; at this point the musical motif of the attack returns this time underscoring a huntsman firing at an ostrich egg and a second huntsman shooting the first; this leads to a funeral procession whereby the hearse is drawn by a camel; the procession begins in ungainly slow motion and turns into a seemingly unending chase across Paris and out into the countryside; along the route a Kappenberg 4 paralysed man regains his legs and eventually the dead man or conjurer falls out of his coffin and makes everyone disappear, including himself. Finally, the film promises to end when a character jumps out of the screen towards the audience. He is, however, kicked in his head in such a way that he flies back through the screen and into the film from which he comes, thereby undermining the sense of conclusion the audience may have been waiting for. In summary, Entr’acte is a violent film which directly targets its audience. The images mock their sense of propriety and the non-logical sequencing taunts anyone who tries to make sense. No doubt Entr’acte is a subversive element in an already subversive spectacle. But should Entr’acte be attributed to Dada or Surrealism? In the 20s the artist Picabia was best known as a painter and as a founding member of Dada, which is why audiences considered Relâche to be a Dada event. As George Baker demonstrates in a detailed study of Picabia and his relations with fellow Parisian artists, Picabia’s work had been a sort of dialogic practice, informed by the collective of atists like Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Duchamp and Andre Breton.6 Picabia, however, refused any classification of himself by the time he conceived of the film. He had officially broken with Dada in 1921 and Dada itself imploded in around 1922 or 1923.7 At the time Breton had started to form a new circle of friends around him and Picabia’s relation with Breton turned into a rivalry, leading to an angry, public split.

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